1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to beam splitting devices and, more particularly, to a beam splitting ball lens, a method for its manufacture, and an apparatus for its packaging.
2. Prior Art
Recent advances of technologies have lead to successful deployments of optics to cost-sensitive local area networking environments. To meet rapidly increasing bandwidth requirements for future multimedia computing and communications, planning for 10 Gb/s Ethernet is already underway. As technologies become gradually matured, optics will be used for even shorter data links, from inter-computer distances to intra-computer distances. Innovative, compact, and cost-effective packaging methods of optical components are actively being researched.
FIG. 1(a) illustrates a conventional beam splitter 106 and method to perform image relay and split. The beam-splitter 106 is shown surrounded by two pairs of imaging lenses 102, 104. Out of the four possible ports 108, 110, 112, 114 are two-input 108, 114 and two-output 110, 112 ports where input and split/combined output images are located. Such a system has been used to facilitate optical branching functions for parallel array interconnect applications. It is obvious that the setup of FIG. 1(a) is bulky, not to mention potential alignment and packaging complexities resulting therefrom. Thus, conventional beam-splitters 106 do not lend themselves to packaging methods of optical components that will be needed for future multimedia computing and communications.